DR SHAWETA ANAND
DOI: https://doi.org/Applied psychology and public health research commonly assess children’s well-being through indicator-based outcomes such as school enrolment, withdrawal from labour, and institutional compliance. While valuable for population-level monitoring, such approaches offer limited insight into how children themselves evaluate well-being and ill-being across different phases of their lives, particularly within institutional care. This article reconceptualises well-being and ill-being as relational experiences, drawing on qualitative fieldwork with children residing in state-recognised Child Care Institutions in Delhi.
Using in-depth narrative interviews, participant observation, and a phase-based analytic approach, the study traces children’s evaluations of well-being and ill-being across five life phases: parental homes, mobility, workplaces, rescue, and institutional care. The analysis reveals distinct gendered pathways. Boys’ evaluations foregrounded work, autonomy, and social recognition, with ill-being concentrated around rescue and institutional disruption. Girls’ accounts located ill-being primarily in earlier domestic contexts marked by constraint and abuse, while institutional care was more often evaluated as offering relative safety and future stability, albeit under regulation.
The article makes three contributions. First, it introduces a life-phase analytic framework that enables comparative analysis of well-being across time rather than at single intervention sites. Second, it demonstrates how children actively evaluate protection, care, and harm relationally and comparatively, challenging outcome-based models of well-being. Third, it conceptualises rescue and institutional care as temporal interventions that reorder children’s lives through waiting, suspension, and redirected futures. By foregrounding children’s evaluative perspectives, the study advances applied psychological and public health understandings of child protection beyond indicator-driven approaches.
